Three Daughters: A Novel

Born in rural Palestine, just before the dawn of the 20th century, Miriam adores her father and is certain his love will protect her, but she soon finds that tradition overrides love. Uprooted by war, Miriam enters a world where the old constraints slip away with thrilling and disastrous results. Miriam's rebellious daughter, Nadia, is thrilled with the opportunity for a modern life that her elite education provides. But when she falls in love with an outsider, the clan reins her back with a shocking finality.

Lost for Words

Loveday Cardew prefers books to people, and her job in a York bookshop is her refuge. If you look carefully, you might see the first lines of the novels she loves the most tattooed on her skin, but there are secrets Loveday will never share. Into the bookshop come a poet, a lover, a friend and three mysterious deliveries, each of which stirs unsettling memories she wants to forget. Turning the pages of her past will be the hardest thing Loveday has ever done. Can she trust those around her?

Two Sisters

They told us he had been missing for nearly two days, that he probably drowned. They told us a lie. Megan was 10 years old when her older brother, Zac, went missing among the cliffs, caves, and beaches that surround the small seaside town of Whitecliff. A decade later, a car crash has claimed the lives of her parents. Megan and her younger sister, Chloe, return to Whitecliff one summer for the first time since their brother's disappearance.

The Secret Scripture

Nearing her 100th birthday, Roseanne McNulty faces an uncertain future, as the Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital where's she spent most of her adult life prepares for closure. Over the weeks leading up to this upheaval, she talks with her psychiatrist, Dr. Greene, and their relationship intensifies and complicates. Told through their respective journals, the story that emerges is at once shocking and deeply beautiful.

The Invention of Wings

From the celebrated author of the international bes tseller The Secret Life of Bees comes an extraordinary novel about two exceptional women. Sarah Grimké is the middle daughter. The one her mother calls difficult and her father calls remarkable. On Sarah's eleventh birthday, Hetty 'Handful' Grimke is taken from the slave quarters she shares with her mother, wrapped in lavender ribbons, and presented to Sarah as a gift.

Sisters One, Two, Three

After a tragic accident on Martha's Vineyard, keeping secrets becomes a way of life for the Tangle family. With memories locked away, the sisters take divergent paths. Callie disappears, Mimi keeps so busy she has no time to think, and Ginger develops a lifelong aversion to risk that threatens the relationships she holds most dear. When a whispered comment overheard by her rebellious teenage daughter forces Ginger to reveal a long-held family secret, the Tangles' carefully constructed web of lies begins to unravel.

Black Diamonds: The Rise and Fall of an English Dynasty

Wentworth is today a crumbling and forgotten palace in Yorkshire. Yet just 100 years ago it was the ancestral pile of the Fitzwilliams' - an aristocratic clan whose home and life were fuelled by coal mining. This is the story of their spectacular decline: of inheritance fights; rumours of a changeling and of lunacy; philandering earls; illicit love; war heroism: a tragic connection to the Kennedys'; violent deaths: mining poverty and squalor; and a class war that literally ripped apart the local landscape.

The Japanese Lover

In 1939, as Poland falls under the shadow of the Nazis, young Alma Belasco's parents send her away to live in safety with an aunt and uncle in their opulent mansion in San Francisco. There, as the rest of the world goes to war, she encounters Ichimei Fukuda, the quiet and gentle son of the family's Japanese gardener. Unnoticed by those around them, a tender love affair begins to blossom. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the two are cruelly pulled apart.

Yellow Crocus

Moments after Lisbeth is born, she’s taken from her mother and handed over to an enslaved wet nurse, Mattie, a young mother separated from her own infant son in order to care for her tiny charge. Thus begins an intense relationship that will shape both of their lives for decades to come. Though Lisbeth leads a life of privilege, she finds nothing but loneliness in the company of her overwhelmed mother and her distant, slave-owning father.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness

In a city graveyard, a resident unrolls a threadbare Persian carpet between two graves. On a concrete sidewalk, a baby appears quite suddenly, a little after midnight, in a crib of litter. In a snowy valley, a father writes to his five-year-old daughter about the number of people who attended her funeral. And in the Jannat Guest House, two people who've known each other all their lives sleep with their arms wrapped around one another as though they have only just met.

Florence Grace

Florrie Buckley is an orphan living on the wind-blasted moors of Cornwall. It's a hard existence, but Florrie is content; she runs wild in the mysterious landscape. She thinks her destiny is set in stone. But when Florrie is 14, she inherits a never-imagined secret. She is related to a wealthy and notorious London family: the Graces.

The Keeper of Lost Things

Once a celebrated author of short stories now in his twilight years, Anthony Peardew has spent half his life lovingly collecting lost objects, trying to atone for a promise broken many years before. Realising he is running out of time, he leaves his house and all its lost treasures to his assistant, Laura, the one person he can trust to fulfil his legacy and reunite the thousands of objects with their rightful owners.

The Liberation

The Liberation is set in Italy in 1945 as British and American troops attempt to bring order to the devastated country and Italy's population fights to survive. Caterina Lombardi is desperate - her father is dead, her mother has disappeared, and her brother is being drawn toward danger. One morning, among the ruins of the bombed Naples streets, Caterina is forced to go to extreme lengths to protect her own life and in doing so forges a future in which she must clear her father's name.

The Wonder

An 11-year-old girl stops eating but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse sent to investigate whether she is a fraud meets a journalist hungry for a story. Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghue's The Wonder - inspired by numerous European and North American cases of 'fasting girls' between the 16th century and the 20th - is a psychological thriller about a child's murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes.

Silence

Recipient of the 1966 Tanizaki Prize, it has been called Endo's supreme achievement" and "one of the twentieth century's finest novels". Considered controversial ever since its first publication, it tackles the thorniest religious issues of belief and faith head on. A novel of historical fiction, it is the story of a Jesuit missionary sent to seventeenth century Japan, who endured persecution that followed the defeat of the Shimabara Rebellion.

Love in the Time of Cholera

From the Nobel Prize-winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude comes a masterly evocation of an unrequited passion so strong that it binds two people's lives together for more than half a century. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career, he whiles away the years in 622 affairs - yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral....

The Tidal Zone

A poignant, funny and engrossing exploration of family life centred around a cataclysmic event and its aftermath, from the author of Night Waking and Signs for Lost Children. Adam is a stay-at-home dad who is also working on a history of the bombing and rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral. He is a good man, and he is happy. But one day he receives a call from his daughter's school to inform him that for no apparent reason, 15-year-old Miriam has collapsed and stopped breathing.

Mornings in Jenin

Forcibly removed from the olive-farming village of Ein Hod by the newly formed state of Israel in 1948, the Abulhejos are displaced to live in canvas tents in the Jenin refugee camp. We follow the Abulhejo family as they live through a half century of violent history. Amid the loss and fear, hatred and pain, as their tents are replaced by more forebodingly permanent cinderblock huts, there is always the waiting, waiting to return to a lost home.

The Essex Serpent

London 1893: When Cora Seaborne and her son Francis reach Essex, rumours spread from further up the estuary that the mythical Essex Serpent, once said to roam the marshes claiming lives, has returned to the coastal parish of Aldwinter. Cora, a keen amateur naturalist is enthralled, convinced that it may be a previously undiscovered species. As she sets out on its trail she meets William Ransome, Aldwinter's vicar.

The House at the Edge of the World

John Venton's drunken fall from a cliff leaves his family with an embarrassing ghost. His twin children, Morwenna and Corwin, flee in separate directions as their mother, enraged by years of unhappy marriage, embraces merry widowhood. Only their grandfather finds solace in the crumbling house, endlessly painting their story onto a large canvas map. As the twins are drawn back to the house, they discover that their father's absence is part of the map's mysterious pull.

Any Human Heart

Every life is both ordinary and extraordinary, but Logan Mountstuart's - lived from the beginning to the end of the 20th century - contains more than its fair share of both. As a writer who finds inspiration with Hemingway in Paris and Virginia Woolf in London, as a spy recruited by Ian Fleming and betrayed in the war and as an art-dealer in '60s New York, Logan mixes with the movers and shakers of his times. But as a son, friend, lover and husband, he makes the same mistakes we all do in our search for happiness.

Swimming Lessons

Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides each in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter, she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan. Twelve years after her disappearance, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window.

Days Without End

Having signed up for the US Army in the 1850s, aged barely 17, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, go on to fight in the Indian wars and ultimately the Civil War. Orphans of terrible hardships themselves, despite the horrors they both see and are complicit in, they find these days to be vivid. Both an intensely poignant story of two men and the lives they are dealt and a fresh look at some of the most fateful years in America's past.

The Signature of All Things

Elizabeth Gilbert’s first novel in twelve years is an extraordinary story of botany, exploration and desire, spanning across much of the 19th century. This audiobook follows the fortunes of the brilliant Alma Whittaker (daughter of a bold and charismatic botanical explorer) as she comes into her own within the world of plants and science. As Alma’s careful studies of moss take her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, the man she loves draws her in the opposite direction into the realm of the spiritual, the divine and the magical.

Publisher's Summary

Facing challenges in an increasingly colonial world, Chye Hoon, a rebellious young girl, must learn to embrace her mixed Malayan-Chinese identity as a Nyonya - and her destiny as a cook, rather than following her first dream of attending school like her brother.

Amidst the smells of chillies and garlic frying, Chye Hoon begins to appreciate the richness of her traditions, eventually marrying Wong Peng Choon, a Chinese man. Together, they have ten children. At last, she can pass on the stories she has heard - magical tales of men from the sea - and her warrior's courage, along with her wonderful kueh (cakes).

But the cultural shift towards the West has begun. Chye Hoon finds herself afraid of losing the heritage she so prizes as her children move more and more into the modernising Western world.

At first I thought I wouldn't be able to get into the story because it was read by an English narrator. That soon changed as the narrator brought in the local way of speaking. I was enthralled. I am an English lady in her seventies . My late husband was Hokkien Chinese originally born in Malaya. Later, the whole family moved to Singapore. We lived in Singapore with family in the sixties and seventies.It was an absolute delight to read this story and brought back many wonderful memories of my time there. Of course I was familiar with the style of language and the mixture of the Chinese and Malay cultures. This fascinating book and the brilliant narration by Christine Rendel really brought back wonderful memories of our time there.I can't wait to read another book by Selina Siak Chin Yoke.

If it was 2/3 shorter than it was. And the tedium was arduous and painful. The names of all the characters were hard to keep track of. I had to force myself to finish it even though I liked the concept and was looking forward to learning about the culture.I guess what would have made it better was to not have read it~

Would you recommend The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds to your friends? Why or why not?

No....boring, arduous....repetitive and nothing of great interest. Nothing memorable or noteworthy.

What character would you cut from The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds?

I can't even recall their names!

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

gostephi

usa

16/04/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"mercy! wtf is going on???"

What would have made The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds better?

uh get another narrator?

What was most disappointing about Selina Siak Chin Yoke’s story?

disappointing? how bout this: i don't even recognize the name(s)! i must've heard them, but...the way SOMEbody's asian pronounciations were so off the mark, it ruined the ambiance.

What didn’t you like about Christine Rendel’s performance?

buzzkill. i'm sure she would read Downton Abbey really fine

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds?

are you kidding me?? pshh no way. thank goodness #audible is so understanding. i'm not famous or anything, but i'm old. no time to waste..you get my drift?

Any additional comments?

again, i'm just an old woman, but i enjoy submerging myself in a great audiobook. i do not however appreciate being read to like a school child. am i wrong to yearn for the sound of an (authentic) asian-accented narrator?

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

barbara mcfadyen

29/03/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Disappointing"

This book was very dull. It was a very flat storyline, just point a to b to c. No interesting turns, writing style was too simplistic. I do not recommend, had to force myself through it!

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Amazon Customer cheri

25/09/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Taming the Tiger Spirit Within"

Hair combing ceremony very touching. This is a story set in a foreign land, and, in past eras. Told from main characters point of view which evoked empathy in me as I listened to a venerated elder share her life. Relationships can sometimes be difficult in any culture, and they also give life meaning when traditions are shared from old to young and then again from young to old. I became enamored with the intricacies of Malayan courtesies and customs and with the struggles in this woman's life . I valued the explanations regarding language at the end of the audible version. I mourned her passing with her family but it was a gentle conclusion which made it easier. I will listen to this many times....

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

FinnessaWilliams

austn texas by way of michigan

13/08/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Amazing!"

I got the book for free on Kindle and it was such a wonder to read! I admired this woman and looked at her ass a role model throughout. I teared up a couple of times as I tried for her and mourned her losses. The very British voice was distracting and took away from what I felt was such a tender story and lacked the nuance and wisdom that I felt this brave woman had. The voice actor just did not have anything delicate behind her inflection and caused the story to miss the perfect score it deserved. That being said, I have listened to this story about 5 or 6 times since I downloaded it and listen until I fall asleep and play it numerous times throughout the night. it's a very well done story.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

J. Reimer

Penang, Malaysia

12/07/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Wonderfully told; perfectly narrated!"

Performance is perfect. Narrator does unique voices for all characters. Even main characters voice changes over length of narrative as they "get older." If you have interest or experience in Malaysia and Chinese culture in that part of the world you will live this story!

The only reason story is not rated 5 is because it lacks clear singular crisis. Of course this is more realistic as it covers the life of a Chinese matriarch. Wonderfully told; perfectly narrated.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Mike B

12/07/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"this story was captivating"

The story was captivating for reasons I still haven't figured out. I was drawn into the story and found myself Wanting to hear About the challenges joys and experiences of the characters lives .I'm a person who typically reads science fiction and on rare occasions biographies, and historical nonfiction. I enjoyed this book very much

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

MichelleW

Iowa, USA

08/07/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Begins interesting but becomes tedious."

the narrator kept me interested enough to finish but it is long and meandering. 3 stars

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

Pato

BROWNSVILLE, TEXAS, US

21/02/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Excelent story."

I wish you had more of her books. The story is engaging and the narrator is outstanding. I highly recommend it.

1 of 2 people found this review helpful

Wonder

USA

17/01/17

Overall

Performance

Story

"Uniquely-Malaysian and universal values"

What did you love best about The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds?

The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds in a lovely story and of family, Malaysian culture, and traditions; unique to Malaysian-Chinese/Nonya heritage while also universal for families and individuals of all backgrounds.

What do you think the narrator could have done better?

Narrator was fair, has a pleasant accent of her own, and did a good job with the reading, *however* this audiobook would have been immensely more immersive and effective with a Malaysian narrator with native accent-- really disappointed on this count throughout the audiobook experience; reading the book (kindle) was much more peaceful and immersive on this count.

If you could rename The Woman Who Breathed Two Worlds, what would you call it?

I would not change the title of this book.

Any additional comments?

Looking forward to more books in this series.

0 of 0 people found this review helpful

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